As California’s economy struggles to rebound from the collapse of the housing bubble, it is difficult to imagine what will lead us out of this hole. We had the dot-com boom and bust, and then a housing-led recovery that turned out to be a mirage. Is there some industry, some idea that can reignite sustainable growth in this once-golden state?

Maybe not. And maybe that’s the wrong way to think about the problem.

It could be that there are six or eight or 10 major industries that together will form the foundation for the new California economy.

The Internet is here to stay, and the Silicon Valley remains a hotbed of innovation in that field. Biotechnology centers in San Diego and San Francisco are poised for additional growth. Los Angeles has lost some of the movie business but is still a center for multimedia arts and entertainment.

And the Central Valley is making a pitch to be the new home of research and development in green industry, including solar power and water technology.

Peter Weber, a retired corporate executive and civic activist from Fresno, has studied what makes economies tick and is promoting a regional approach as a long-term strategy for California. He thinks local governments and the state should make the development of regional economic clusters their top priority.

“I think the potential return on investment is huge for the state,” Weber, who was a vice president for FMC Corp. before retiring in 2001, told me recently. “We are spending a lot of time on government accountability, budget reform, fiscal reform. All of that is broken and needs to get fixed.

“The one thing that does not get discussed is how we grow the size of the pie so we have more revenues that generate a higher tax base that enables us to invest in building a better future. I am absolutely convinced that the answer to that is through growing regional economies.”

Weber points to the experience of Akron, Ohio, as an example.

Devastated by decline of the rubber tire business, Akron was in a deep economic slump in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then private sector, government and academic leaders came together to leverage the region’s expertise with rubber, a naturally occurring polymer, to become a center for the development of modern, polymer-based synthetic materials.

The University of Akron built a Department of Polymer Engineering, and the Polymer Processing Society was created in 1985 to attract research to the region. By the end of the decade, Weber says, more than 300 polymer companies were operating in Akron.

The Akron metropolitan area saw its gross domestic product grow by an average of 6.7percent per year between 1990 and 2007, which was triple the rate of what it had been for the decade before.

If California’s GDP could be increased by just 1 percent above what it otherwise would be, the extra growth would mean $17 billion a year in company revenue and between $2.5billion and $5 billion in new tax revenue, Weber said in a paper he wrote on the idea for California Forward, a nonpartisan political reform group.

Weber proposes less than $100 million in new spending over five years in a program that would rely on “challenge grants” to give incentives to the private sector, academia and local governments to nurture industry clusters that are forming naturally in their regions.

He has already seen such an approach begin to work in his adopted home town of Fresno. There, former Mayor Alan Autry put Weber in charge of drafting a plan to end the city’s 25-year history of double-digit unemployment. That plan became part of a regional initiative that has rallied an eight-county region around the development of five industry clusters: agribusiness and food processing; manufacturing, including water technology; supply chain management; health and medical care; and renewable energy.

No single idea is going to revive California’s economy. But if the state and local governments can stop fighting each other long enough to step back and ask what they can do to promote economic growth rather than retard it, all of us will no doubt be better off.

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